The DOS window does dissappear. When gNotify does establish a connection it promps me for a username and password, which are stored by windows. I just have to click OK or hit ENTER if its the active window. I was wishing I could make the batch file hit enter

I wish there was a way to trick the file into thinking that I pressed the enter key.

If you were going with the batch file - Instead of using "sleep" to delay, you could also "ping" the localhost (127.0.0.1), specify how many times it should ping (or how many seconds until the bat continues), and redirect the output to nul so it doesn't echo to your screen..